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Automattic / simplenote-electron

Simplenote for Web, Windows, and Linux
https://app.simplenote.com
GNU General Public License v2.0
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"Inactive" notes not exported #3196

Open bitfield opened 1 year ago

bitfield commented 1 year ago

I exported my notes via the web app as a backup. When I looked inside the zip file, I found that not all my notes were included. Only about half of them were present.

In the notes.json file, I found two keys: activeNotes, with about as many members as there were notes in the zip file directory, and trashedNotes, listing all deleted notes.

So I'm guessing that when Simplenote exports notes, it exports only what it considers "active" notes (that is, I'm also guessing, notes that have been updated recently). By inspection, the cutoff date seems to be about five years ago.

I would have expected that the 'Export notes' feature would export all notes, but it doesn't. My backup file is missing many important old notes. Interestingly, trashed notes seem to be included no matter how old they are. This doesn't quite make sense from the user's point of view, since notes that have been deleted are less important to retain than notes that haven't.

How can I export all notes, including "inactive" ones?

peril-automattic[bot] commented 1 year ago
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peril-automattic[bot] commented 1 year ago
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charliescheer commented 4 months ago

Transferred this issue over to Simplenote Web. There is not an export notes feature on Simplenote Mac

codebykat commented 4 months ago

That's odd, it should export all notes, trashed and otherwise. I also have a pretty old account with a ton of notes in it and have gotten a complete backup with no issues. @bitfield Roughly how many notes do you have?

(The "active" notes key is a red herring, btw, that simply is the category for a non-trashed note... there's no date cutoff for considering a note "active".)

bitfield commented 4 months ago

539, according to the Mac app when I 'select all'. Exporting from the web app produces a ZIP file containing 535 notes, plus 'source' and 'trash' folders. This is quite different to what I saw when I exported last year, so I guess the format has changed in the meantime.

My oldest note is from January 2011, and that's included in the export. I'm not sure which 4 notes were not included, or why.

codebykat commented 4 months ago

Well that's... better, but still disconcerting. The export format should not have changed anytime recently, unless your initial export was perhaps from an old version of the app? And I don't like the missing four notes, but now I wonder if the Mac app is actually miscounting.

I dug into this a little and I think something might be timing out. I will look into this further...